The Weekly Review: Week 43

Weekly Main Event

Ava's IEP meeting was held Thursday morning. It went well. She'll be receiving 90 minutes of speech therapy a week beginning on her birthday and 15 minutes of consultative services/month beginning in the fall when she moves from daycare to preschool. It's nice to actually be anticipating the benefits of the transition from early intervention services to services provided by the schools. The program she'll be entering seems to be extremely well designed and well suited to her needs. I am excited and thankful that she'll have the opportunity to participate.

Ava this Week

Completely spontaneously, with very little encouragement or input from us, Ava has begun to night train. She's been potty trained during the day since well before she turned two. She just picked that up when we were training Michael. Over the last week she has begun to wake up in the middle of the night disoriented and somewhat panicked wanting assistance in going to the potty. She takes great pride in trying to keep her nap and nighttime pullups dry.

I am proud of her, of course. Is it terrible to admit that the return to inconsistent and unexpected night time wake-ups is very unpleasant? I wonder how long this will last? When will she learn to just take herself? Or, even better, just be able to hold it until morning?

Even with the inconvenience and disrupted sleep it is still a huge milestone and I'm simultaneously proud of her and amazed at how big she's getting.

The Weekly Michael

Have you ever heard the phrase, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."?

Let's just say that the combination of my stress level this week and subsequent impatience and Michael becoming a little older and more independent and stretching his wings has been a bit...unfortunate.

I'm desperately trying to be more positive and use more redirection. And I'll just leave it at that.

Ava's Weekly Home Therapy Focus

We're continuing to work on initial and final /k, s, sh, and f/. We're also working on initial /l/.

We chose /k/ months ago because Ava was fronting everything and didn't really have any back sounds at all. We finally have an approximation of /k/, but some nights it comes out flawlessly on every repetition of every word and other nights she substitutes /t/ every time and nothing I try changes that. Ahh, lovely motor planning problem.

We added /s, sh, and f/ recently because Ava wasn't really using any fricatives and she was stimulable for all three. She's doing remarkably well with all of them. /f/ is particularly easy for her and I'm already seeing occasional spontaneous generalization in conversation. /s/ is pretty good and with a gestural cue I can get a good production every time. /sh/ is a bit more difficult, which makes sense given that she has more difficulty with sounds that are produced further back in the mouth. However, with more intensive cueing, she's pretty successful there as well.

We added /l/ because it is a phoneme she uses daily. It is in the name of someone in her life. She really struggled with it for the first few weeks, but this week it has really clicked for her. She seems to enjoy it and is spontaneously using it correctly in conversational speech. It's a thrill for me every time. I love hearing the beautiful /l/ and enjoy watching her pride in making it.